A Vision of the Future

At The Vision Show last month in Boston, keynote speaker Dennis Treece spoke about the evolving “security vision” market, in which machine vision for packaging integrity is morphing to perform security duties. The retired Army colonel and former director of security and emergency preparedness for the Massachusetts Port Authority delivered a presentation on cutting-edge surveillance technologies in use today, saying that a lucrative market exists despite concerns ranging from cost and ease of retrieval to access, use and privacy policies. In this era, he said, when every smartphone and tablet can take pictures, “public and private surveillance images plus public participation is the new black” for forensic use of the technology.

Surveillance systems also are making use of the latest advances in 3-D sensing systems. In our cover story, authors Andre Wong and Markus Bilger of JDSU explain how technology is already evolving in complexity from offering capabilities such as tracking animals and humans to keep them safe in high-risk areas, to knowing not just that a head nodded, for example, but whose head it was. Some of the technology behind these changes is described in “Light Sources, Filters Enable 3-D Sensing Advances,” starting on page 40.

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Also known as QDs. Nanocrystals of semiconductor materials that fluoresce when excited by external light sources, primarily in narrow visible and near-infrared regions; they are commonly used as alternatives to organic dyes.